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A great website I like to use for eLearning resources is elearningindustry.com I recently read an article by Stephanie Ivec that summarized important instructional design decisions that should not be overlooked. The article is titled 5 Instructional Design Traps to Avoid.

Ivec warned against falling into these common traps:

Forgetting Learning Objectives

The benefit of learning objectives is that they keep the course focused.

Too Long to Be Engaging

According to Ivec, and I agree, elearning gives developers the opportunity to divide complex topics into smaller modules for easier comprehension.

Features for the Sake of Features

Limiting animations and features for when they make important information stand out will help learners process key content.

Irrelevant Content

Using scenarios and real-world examples will help learners apply the learning to their job tasks.

No Evaluation

Evaluating the effectiveness of the eLearning course can help create better courses in the future.

My department of eLearning Developers/ Instructional Designers have been perfecting our methods of instructional design. We have discussed different approaches to making our eLearning courses effective and exciting for our learners.

We’ve created a standardized template that includes an introduction, objectives, agenda, content, practice activities, and summary. The template helps us to keep our courses consistent and minimizes the use of unnecessary animations that may otherwise distract the learners.

We’ve ensured that each topic is concise, not more than 3-4 minutes per demonstration, with an activity to keep our learners engaged. We’ve eliminated irrelevant content, such as removing content that is too novice for our learners. The course concludes with an evaluation– a quiz assessing the learner’s knowledge of the content.

Overall, it is important for instructional designers to give everything the learners need and nothing more. It’s also important that the content is packaged in a way that is manageable and intriguing.

An instructional designer can stand out from others by developing comprehensive learning experiences that stimulate user interaction.

There are three components to instructional design development that are typically included in eLearning:

Tell– the user about the subject matter

Show– the user the subject matter with images and videos

Do– provide the user with a practice activity that replicates what was told and shown

The tell and show are most commonly used in instructional design because they take less time and resources to develop.

Depending on the scope and time frame to develop the training project, talented instructional designers are able to create a stimulating user interaction experience—the Do.

I’ve recently had the opportunity to begin new projects where I’ve scoped out interaction.

After discussing the timeline and workload with my colleagues, we decided to complete two reiterations of the courses.

The first versions of the courses include the “tell” and “show” components. We decided to launch these first versions of the courses in order to provide our users with timely content. The second version of the courses will include the tell and show content, but will also include user activities.

We record all of the content pieces for both versions of the course at the same time, but post production is first conducted on the Tell and Show version. After a course is complete and launched to to the users, the Do content is then edited, added to the course, and relaunched to the users.

The content for these courses were produced as follows:

Tell– Use Adobe Audition to record subject matter experts’ narrations of the content

Show– At the same recording sessions as the “tell”, the subject matter experts’ record a screen capture using TechSmith’s Camtasia. After editing these with the voiceovers, the final result are “Demonstrations” that show the user the subject matter

Do – The final piece of production is recording a second version of the subject matter in Adobe Captivate. We’ve been able to record Camtasia and Captivate on the same computer, at the same time. After post production is concluded on the tell and show, attention is focused on producing “Try-It’s” that allow the users to practice what they learned earlier in the course.